A dead bat and a rabies freakout are a reminder: Vaccinations save lives.

Sara Rubin here, happy to announce that neither I nor my two cats have rabies. More specifically, as I was informed yesterday by both the Monterey County Health Department and Hitchcock Road Animal Services Department, a dead bat discovered on my bedroom floor early Tuesday morning did not have rabies. Phew. 

It was good news after a little more than 48 hours of going down the rabbit hole of reading about the rabies virus, for which there is still no cure—once symptoms develop, it is fatal.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, most people in the U.S. who die from rabies got it from a bat. They are the most reported rabid animal. 

I put on a pair of latex gloves then double bagged the sad bat carcass and brought it outside to the trash. I also checked in with my veterinarian, who checked my cats’ records and confirmed both are current on their rabies boosters; there was no need to bring them in. Another phew. 

I debated whether to notify the Health Department, given that my cats were in the clear thanks to vaccines. But the public health guidance calls for alerting them to a bat discovered in your home. “Any animal bitten or scratched by either a wild, carnivorous mammal or a bat should be regarded as having been exposed to rabies,” the guidelines read. Only dead animals can be tested for rabies, and so I fished the bat out of the trash and delivered it to Hitchcock Road Animal Services on Wednesday. 

Animal Services advised me to keep the cats quarantined indoors while the lab result was pending. And then a public health official called me with the advice to head to the emergency room and prophylactically start rabies shots—they’re most effective on day zero or close to it, and I might have been bitten by the bat, which can be totally painless, and that it might come back positive for rabies. 

I immediately began to regret that I’d done the right thing for public health and delivered the animal for testing. It seemed impossible to me that a cat in pursuit of a flying mammal that had bitten me in my sleep would not have awoken me. But still, I found myself nervously wondering, should I preemptively start rabies shots? 

I did not give in to fear, and just barely more than 24 hours after I delivered the bat, the results came back: negative for rabies. 

That was a sigh of relief. Cat quarantine orders were lifted, and no shots were recommended for the humans of the house. 

Public health protocols can be inconvenient, even if they’re just in place for 48 hours until good news comes back from the lab. I was reminded of why public health protocols during the Covid-19 pandemic largely failed—it’s annoying to inconvenience ourselves (and our pets), even if we know it can save other lives. Taking extreme measures—especially in the absence of certain lab results—is a pain. But it’s the model upon which public health relies, and every bat carcass delivered and tested is a data point in determining if there seems to be an outbreak in a particular area that can be deadly to humans and pets. 

The biggest takeaway for me was that having pets up-to-date on vaccinations is key. I can only guess how many bats my cats have pursued that I don’t know about—only this one, presented lovingly laid at the foot of the bed, became a gift in reminding myself that public health does sometimes take an individual’s effort.